Email messaging systems have become a regular form of communication for people in their work and social interactions. The use of email messages is particularly effective when communicating the same message to multiple recipients. The information that develops in a user's email application shows groups that the user communicates with. The groups may be defined by social activities, work, study, sport, committees, etc. This organizational information that exists in email messaging systems is very valuable to the user and any organization they work for.
People receive irrelevant email messages when users forward, reply to, or send email messages to irrelevant addressees by mistake. Receiving an irrelevant email message can be annoying as the recipient must ascertain that it is not intended for him, and this may waste valuable working time and distract the recipient from other tasks. Privacy may also be compromised by the wrong recipient receiving confidential information contained in an erroneously sent message.
Email messages are often sent to incorrect addressees when the sender is sending an email to a group of recipients. Much of email messaging traffic is generated by email messages addressed to a group of recipients and handling these groups of contacts in a careful way is desired. This will lower the chances of a recipient receiving an irrelevant message as well as protecting the sender's privacy.
Current email applications support groups of contacts in the following ways.                Groups of users are predefined for the organization as a whole. For example, this is done in Lotus Notes for IBM (Lotus Notes and IBM are trade marks of International Business Machines Corporation). Most of the groups are taken from an organizational chart in which employees positions in the organization are defined.        Users of email applications are able to manually define their own groups of contacts. In practice, most email users do not use the manual definition of groups and make use of only those groups who have been predefined for their organization.        